"Are we prepared to promote conditions in which the living contact with God can be reestablished? For our lives today have become godless to the point of complete vacuity. God is no longer with us in the conscious sense of the word. He is denied, ignored, excluded from every claim to have a part in our daily life." - Alfred Delp, S.J.

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Kitsch

While on the subject of the Archbishop Weakland memorial...
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Kitsch is not just something second rate Catholic retailers sell, or the unholy images we place in our churches. I found the following on The Lion and the Cardinal - one of the better blogs online BTW. The brief excerpt may help to understand why many of us become so uncomfortable with what Catholic popular culture often mistakes for piety, liturgy, art, and authentic spirituality.

.On KITSCH
-Roger Scruton:
.Kitsch, as I see it, is a religious phenomenon - an attempt to disguise the loss of faith, by filling the world with fake emotions, fake morality and fake aesthetic values.... .Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred an unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgment. When faith declines, however, the sacred is unprotected from marauders; the heart can be captured and put on sale. When this happens the human heart becomes kitsch. The clichéd kiss, the doe-eyed smile, the Christmas-card sentiments advertise what cannot be advertised without ceasing to be. They therefore commit the salesman to nothing; they can be bought and sold without emotional hardship, since the emotion, being a fantasy product, no longer exists in its committed and judgment-bearing form. .Much of our present cultural situation can be seen as a response to this remarkable phenomenon - never, I think, encountered before in history. Kitsch reflects our spiritual waywardness, and our failure, not merely to value the human spirit, but rather to perform those sacrificial acts which create it. Nor is kitsch a purely aesthetic disease. Every ceremony, every ritual, every public display of emotion can be kitsched - and inevitably will be kitsched, unless controlled by some severe critical discipline... Think of the Disneyland versions of monarchical and state occasions which are rapidly replacing the old stately forms... .It is surely impossible to flee from kitsch by taking refuge in religion, when religion itself is kitsch. The modernisation of the Roman Catholic Mass and the Anglican Prayer Book were really a kitschification: and attempts at liturgical art are now poxed all over with the same disease. The day-to-day services of the Christian churches are embarrassing reminders of the fact that religion is losing its sublime godwardness, and turning instead towards the world of mass production. And surely Eliot was right to imply that we cannot overcome kitsch through art alone: the recovery of the tradition is also a reorganisation of our lives, and involves a spiritual as well as an aesthetic transformation.

Oh, I whole heartedly agree kitch can be nauseating--does not spur the mind and soul towards Heaven. Beautiful statues and art can help elevate the mind and heart, while kitch, well, if it comes to me--ends up in the trash.

I suppose I could devote several posts to this subject but it isn't that everything plastic or inexpensive or mass produced is bad - nor is all kitsch bad. The weeping image of the Madonna of Syracuse is a prime example. At one time the art world regarded mexican retablos as kitsch and now they are pricey works of art - yet they were always sincere images of devotion.

The first photo on this post points to a more disturbing embrace of kitsch by the huggy-feelie spiritualities dissidents often embrace, with their drums and feathers and fetishes and self-centering praise events.

"Kitsch", in my mind, is the emotional consolation in a religious sense, with no real content.The iconographic tradition has always held that even "poorly" done icons have sometimes been the source of miracles, not because of its depiction, but because of the faith and holiness of the iconographer.If we just want to "feel good", as opposed to being lead deeper into union with God, accepting our sufferings, loving our brethren, then "kitsch" is what we will settle for.

Veritatis Splendor

About Me

... My idea of what I am is falsified by my preoccupation about what I do. And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion from the illusions of other men. We all seek to emulate one anothers imagined greatness....If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants me to be. I have asked myself whether I wanted to become what everybody else seems to want to become... only to realize that I do not admire what everyone else seems to admire. I have only thus begun to live after all... But it is very late. - Adapted from a quote by Thomas Merton

Holy Face of Jesus

Show us your face and we shall be saved. "Each soul is the object of My special love. That is why I am so grateful to those who are resourceful and bringing back sinners to Me. Keep this in mind then. I gave My life for them in the most atrocious torture, for these poor beloved ones. A humble repentance, and they are already on My heart. So speak gently to them. Speak with tenderness. A brusque remark could drive them farther away." - He and I

Prayer to St. Michael

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the malice and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him we humbly pray; and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen.

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